Rachel wandered over to a cabinet and pulled one of the doors open. The handle broke off in her hand and she looked at us in alarm before Lee laughed, reaching for the handle. It was some tacky glass knob, smudged from years of use, that had probably been super modern at one point, the kind of thing everyone wanted. He polished it almost to a shine on his shirt before holding it up.
“Don’t worry, Rach. It’s been like that for years. Elle, remember we used to pretend it was a diamond?”
I grinned. “And we’d break in and steal it.”
“The great jewel heist.” Lee sighed, looking every bit as nostalgic as I felt. In all fairness, we’d probably been the ones to break the handle off the cabinet door just for an excuse to use it in our make-believe heist.
Good times.
Lee turned back to Rachel and placed the glass knob between her fingers like a ring. She giggled, blushing, and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek.
I looked at Noah, who fake-vomited like Lee had just done a little while ago at us, but more quietly. I nudged him with my elbow. “I think it’s sweet,” I whispered.
“Sickly sweet.”
Hmm, maybe a little.
Rachel wiggled the handle back into place and opened the cabinet. There was a stack of books inside and she pulled some out, putting them in the middle of our group. I picked one off the top, quickly realizing it was a photo album.
So, okay, maybe it was my fault we ended up making so little progress in the rumpus room, because I was the one who started combing through the photo albums. The boys didn’t need any persuading to procrastinate by joining me, all of us sharing the best photos we came across and regaling each other with stories of how we remembered the moment. Rachel seemed to be having just as much fun listening to us and looking at the photos, too.
I paused when I came across a photo from when we were all really small. We were maybe eight or nine, the three of us standing on the beach. Lee was missing a tooth. My hair was short and wild, fluffy and sticking out at all kinds of angles. Noah wasn’t much bigger than us in the photo, and his hair was cut short, too, shorter than I ever remembered it being. He was holding a hot dog, and Lee was waving a little paper flag. I stood in the middle of them, my arms slung over both of their shoulders, eyes narrowed to a squint with how big I was smiling at the camera. The photo quality wasn’t the best, but you could make out the colorful blur of fireworks in the background.
“Look at this,” I said, scooting closer to Noah so our thighs pressed together, pushing the photo album halfway onto his lap. Lee bent over to look at the photo. I pointed to the writing beneath it I had just noticed. “Fourth of July. Ten years ago. Look how little we all were.”
“It’s weird how that doesn’t even feel that long ago, huh?” Lee said, looking at both of us with a sad smile, eyes full and one corner of his mouth tilting upward. He pointed at the bright pink dungarees I was wearing in the picture. “I remember those. You wore them all summer.”
“I think it was the girliest thing you wore for years,” Noah agreed.
They probably weren’t wrong, I thought, letting out a breath of laughter. I traced a finger over the picture. Me and my boys. Right where I belonged.
My phone buzzed. My eyes drifted a few feet away to where I’d left it on the floor before I snatched it up to shut off the reminder I’d set yesterday: CALL BERKELEY.
“Somewhere to be?” Rachel joked.
“Gotta take my pill,” I lied, jumping up and going back to where I’d left my purse near the front door, grateful they couldn’t see me and that none of them had questioned me or followed me out. I stared at my phone for another few seconds before shoving it into my purse.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Right?
* * *
• • •
We made the mistake of opening the closet in the corner. The first game we pulled out was Hungry Hungry Hippos, which, of course, meant that we needed a winner-takes-all tournament, playing one-on-one. I lost to Rachel, and Lee lost to Noah; then Noah and Rachel played a fierce game for the final, with Rachel ultimately winning. Lee and I whooped at the top of our lungs, jumping up to do a victory dance—neither of us could remember the last time Noah had lost at that game, despite us not playing for years.
And Noah, unless I was very much mistaken, was pouting.
I ruffled his hair and wrapped my arms around his shoulders as he groaned in defeat, and I kissed the side of his head. “Aw, don’t be a sore loser. She’s a tough cookie. A worthy opponent.”
“I think we should have a rematch. I’m just rusty, that’s all.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Rachel scoffed, grinning.
“Your prize, O Hungriest of Hippos,” Lee announced. He reached into the closet and pulled out a comically huge pair of pink heart-shaped glasses and a feather boa. Rachel laughed, letting him put them on her. She wore them for at least an hour—she still had them on when June and Matthew yelled that they’d ordered some pizzas for our lunch.
We found the pirate accessories and toys Lee and I had loved so much one summer. A pogo stick that I was shockingly okay at, but Lee fell off almost instantly. An old gaming console of Noah’s, which he immediately set up, loaded a game into, and became utterly enraptured by, picking up right where he’d left off for a good twenty minutes until we dragged him away from it.
We found tennis rackets and balls for different games, a couple of footballs, and a brand-new baseball mitt that even my hand was too big for now. I put it in my keep pile, thinking Brad might like it. A sash covered in Boy Scouts badges that belonged to Noah, prompting us to tease him over each one. Lee found a box of magic tricks and we spent a while trying to understand how they worked and one-up each other with our showmanship skills until Rachel uncovered a crappy old karaoke machine that had been my mom’s.
I’d thought Lee was bad at going through his dresser, but he was way worse when it came to our old toys; it was damn near impossible for any of us to persuade him to part with something when he discovered it, having not thought about it for maybe five years or more. He and Noah argued over a few things, until Noah sat on him while I took the pogo stick out to one of the donation boxes in the lounge. Rachel gently talked Lee into parting with a broken Nerf gun. Using the old pirate swords, I challenged him to a duel over the magic set, and eventually wrestled him to the floor and wrenched his sword away when I saw he wasn’t going to give up.
It was rough, and he definitely kept sneaking things back into the keep pile. It kept mysteriously growing. I saw the magic set there again now, even though I’d already moved it to the donation pile at least three times already.
Rachel had gone back to the lounge with a pile of our toys for donation, and she hadn’t come back yet. I guessed June had roped her into helping with something else or another cup of weird floral tea.